Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Harvard University

Past Projects

Leadership

Our objectives in this project are to: (a) investigate whether two distinct status-seeking social strategies— labeled Dominance and Prestige—are both effective avenues to successfully leading and influencing teams; (b) explore how Dominance and Prestige strategies are signaled and sustained through leaders’ verbal and nonverbal behaviors; and (c) examine the impact of Dominant vs. Prestigious leadership on group performance and on follower psychology, including well-being and satisfaction. Project Proposal.

Measuring Cultural Variation

Development of new tools for the measurement of culturally-shared mental phenomena (e.g., representations, scripts, prejudices); studying mechanisms by which these phenomena are transferred and adapted across individuals; and advancing research on the distribution and transmission of cultural phenomena within populations.

Understanding God's Mind

This study will focus on the relationship between how people from different religious traditions understand divine minds, and how this perception influences decisions to cooperate.cooperate. Existing psychological work, performed mostly in North America, suggests that people are capable of perceiving other minds (including divine minds) along a spectrum from more human-like, with personal goals and limited scope, to a hyper-agentic super-intelligence that sees all actions and thoughts. An independent line of work, also performed principally in North America, shows that people who believe in God cooperate more with anonymous others because they feel they are being divinely monitored. We aim to link these two lines of research by comparatively exploring how people from diverse religious traditions and cultures understand the minds of their deities, and how this may or may not impact cooperation with others who stand at different social distances from the actor. Project Proposal.

Virtues in Conflict

"Virtues in Conflict " explores how people from different cultures make tough choices between the better of two goods. Funded by Science of Virtues and University of Chicago.

In daily life, we often face tough choices between competing appeals to our goodwill – not just between being naughty or nice, but between multiple ways of doing good. In this study, a diverse team of scholars conducts a cross-cultural exploration of what these dilemmas are, how they are resolved in different cultural contexts and the cultural and ecological conditions influencing how people resolve them. The project brings together scholars in philosophy, anthropology, psychology and economics and involves fieldwork in 6 countries and 8 fieldsites around the world. Project Webpage.

Folksociology

A cross-cultural and developmental investigation of how groups influence thinking about individuals. Funded by the Social Science Research Council.

Human social life is dominated by groups. Clans, clubs, castes and guilds, along with a constellation of other groups, shape all aspects of human life, from trade and cooperation to marriage and child-rearing. Casual observation suggests that not all kinds of groups are equally salient and durable. Some groups, ethnic and racial groups in particular, seem to stand out in their ability to variously motivate in-group trust and out-group oppression. Our project team aims to probe the psychological foundations of how people in very different societies think about ethnic and racial groups, whether such groups evoke different patterns of inferences vis-à-vis other social groups, and how these patterns develop in children. Project Proposal.

The Origins of Prosociality

Funded by the MacArthur Foundation. This projects involves a comparative study of prosocial behavior in chimpanzees and human children in order to illuminate the phylogeny and ontogeny of social behavior. Collaborative work with Joan Silk, Sarah Brosnan, Daniel Povinelli, and Jennifer Vonk. Project Proposal.

Building a Program in Culture and Cognition

Funded by NSF Anthropology for 5 years. Aim is to understand the ontogeny of culture through a detailed study of cultural learning using in-depth ethnography, social networks, and experiments in Fijian villages. Project Proposal. Project Webpage.

The Roots of Human Sociality: An Ethno-Experimental Exploration of the Foundations of Economic Norms in 16 Small-Scale Societies

Beginning in 1997, we undertook a cross-cultural experimental study in fifteen small-scale societies scattered across the world including Latin America, Africa, Asia, and Indonesia. We found that there was considerably more variation in behavior across societies than had previously been reported, and that it correlated positively with the societies’ degree of involvement in the market.

We set out in Phase II of the project to extend our work on the co-evolution of pro-social norms and the market. In conjunction with new core experiments (the dictator game, the ultimatum game with strategy method, and the third party-punishment game), new sites, and a more rigorous protocol, we also vastly increased the socio-demographic data collection. In addition, some sites ran double blind dictator games, contextualized versions of games, and trust experiments combined with network analysis. Project Proposal. Project Website.